It’s less that thoughts alone are poison and more that, spending attention on thoughts is poison to the process of observing being (because it’s distracting from the pure observing being-ness of being).
Enjoying the music is different from saying “I enjoy the music”. In that difference is the difference between the thought and the doing part of enjoying the music.
There are plenty of things that are usually impaired by thinking. Thinking, however, is not one of them. So while I’m sure you could “vibe” about rationality, that would need to be an activity very different from actually doing rationality.
(Of course one doesn’t have to be doing rationality all the time! And some of those things that are usually impaired by thinking are excellent things to do. So, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying that “vibing” is a Bad Thing. I’m not sure it belongs here, though. Why do we need “What vibing feels like” any more than we need “What being stoned feels like” or “What cuddling with a romantic partner feels like”?)
It’s worth considering the description of “acting via system 1”. As similar and relevant to vibing as described.
Healthy rationality long term needs to integrate both s1 and s2. Not just get the s2 right. Also the more s2 functions that can be entrusted to s1 effectively, the more s2 is free to leap forward into smarter ways of doing things.
One thing that’s important about this post is that it’s meant to evoke a particular set of felt senses more than be literally accurate. For instance, under certain definitions of “thinking”, the only way to avoid it would be to be unconscious or dead, which I’m obviously not trying to state here. This post was merely trying to evoke a certain phenomenological state, without delving into why that state was useful.
There’s a few reasons I think that vibing is useful for rationality, besides being an affordance that can allow you to enjoy communication in a new way (which I think would be reason enough). Note that many of these depend on models that I haven’t written up yet, so I don’t have the means to show why I believe them.
Vibing allows groups to communicate in a way that minimizes rationalizations and defensiveness in the discussion
Vibing allows a sort of proto “Looking” where you can see the world and your own psychology more for what it is as a group
Vibing allows groups to quickly see if a person will fit into their culture
Vibing gives you a better sense of the values people are actually optimizing for, including your own
I think that this sort of list can be dangerous because consciously trying to achieve these things can prevent you from vibing, in a similar way that consciously trying to practice reading people can harm circling, even though it’s a benefit of circling.
It’s tricky, that’s for sure.
It’s less that thoughts alone are poison and more that, spending attention on thoughts is poison to the process of observing being (because it’s distracting from the pure observing being-ness of being).
Enjoying the music is different from saying “I enjoy the music”. In that difference is the difference between the thought and the doing part of enjoying the music.
There are plenty of things that are usually impaired by thinking. Thinking, however, is not one of them. So while I’m sure you could “vibe” about rationality, that would need to be an activity very different from actually doing rationality.
(Of course one doesn’t have to be doing rationality all the time! And some of those things that are usually impaired by thinking are excellent things to do. So, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying that “vibing” is a Bad Thing. I’m not sure it belongs here, though. Why do we need “What vibing feels like” any more than we need “What being stoned feels like” or “What cuddling with a romantic partner feels like”?)
It’s worth considering the description of “acting via system 1”. As similar and relevant to vibing as described.
Healthy rationality long term needs to integrate both s1 and s2. Not just get the s2 right. Also the more s2 functions that can be entrusted to s1 effectively, the more s2 is free to leap forward into smarter ways of doing things.
One thing that’s important about this post is that it’s meant to evoke a particular set of felt senses more than be literally accurate. For instance, under certain definitions of “thinking”, the only way to avoid it would be to be unconscious or dead, which I’m obviously not trying to state here. This post was merely trying to evoke a certain phenomenological state, without delving into why that state was useful.
There’s a few reasons I think that vibing is useful for rationality, besides being an affordance that can allow you to enjoy communication in a new way (which I think would be reason enough). Note that many of these depend on models that I haven’t written up yet, so I don’t have the means to show why I believe them.
Vibing allows groups to communicate in a way that minimizes rationalizations and defensiveness in the discussion
Vibing allows a sort of proto “Looking” where you can see the world and your own psychology more for what it is as a group
Vibing allows groups to quickly see if a person will fit into their culture
Vibing gives you a better sense of the values people are actually optimizing for, including your own
I think that this sort of list can be dangerous because consciously trying to achieve these things can prevent you from vibing, in a similar way that consciously trying to practice reading people can harm circling, even though it’s a benefit of circling.